English: Literature and Medicine

<p>The course examines how medicine—as art, practice, and science—has shaped representations of individuals and public institutions in literature, and how literature, in turn, has historically influenced medical thinking and practice.</p><p>This course is grounded in the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities and focuses on the dynamic relationship between literature and medicine. You study how literary texts reflect and shape understandings of health, illness, the body, and care across different historical periods and cultural contexts.</p><p>A key focus of the course is the affective dimension of health and illness. Literary texts are examined for how they invite readers to engage with powerful and often difficult emotions such as shame, embarrassment, vulnerability, and suffering. Central topics for debate include the role of empathy in reading and the pro-social function of literature, as well as strands of the medical humanities that seek to give voice to difficult, unspoken, unrecognised, or invisible experiences of illness and care.</p>